Abstract
This paper deals with a profound irony at the heart of modern sports: that sports, for almost all of us almost all of the time, are about losing, not winning-about facing failure, not savoring success. The disappointment of defeat, not the satisfaction of victory, is the common condition of playing and watching.
I distinguish here between three broad types of losing: routine failure, the continual necessary production of losers; radical failure, which is failure so complete that it causes dismissal, release, resignation; and, somewhere between the routine and the radical, are those per during losses that constitute repetitive failure. Repetitive failure is the hardest to accept and to explain.
Using the case of the Hanshin Tigers, an Osaka professional baseball team of immense regional popularity but perpetual poor showing, I enumerate several different kinds of factors by which players and fans address, adjust, and accept repetitive failure. These include factors common to many sports, elements distinctive to baseball as a sport, factors distinctive to Japanese baseball, and those rationalizations peculiar to the Hanshin Tigers. I argue that we must identify sets of structural patterns and culturally-inflected rationalizations that keep people playing and watching despite persistent outcomes of defeat. It is a composite model rather than a single “logic of failure” that explains this and other such cases.
